Air Force Nurse Kirsten V., a family friend, recently sent this reflection on her recent deployment to the Bagram Air Field Base Hospital…

A Nurse in Afghanistan

I’m keeping busy at work, obtaining great nursing experience on our Intensive Care Ward. It is a step down from the Intensive Care Unit, but a huge step up from most hospital inpatient units in the States. I care for patients with tracheostomies (artificial airways in their neck), amputations, fractures with and without external fixators (metal rods sticking out from their bones), burns, including airway inhalation, head injuries, eye injuries. We also get medical conditions such as cysts, appendectomies, seizures, combat stress-related issues etc.

Slightly more than half of our patients are US soldiers and coalition forces (French, Romanian, Czech, Polish are examples in the past five weeks). We stabilize them and either return them to duty within two to four days or send them off to Landstuhl, for longer term care. We simply do not have the space, nor the specialties, to keep US forces here long-term.

What we do keep here long-term are the Afghan patients, including those in the Afghan National Army, Afghan Border Police units that our US and Coalition forces are working with on a daily basis to build peace and restore their ability to maintain peace and order once we leave. We also care for local Afghan patients from pediatrics to older adults who are harmed in crossfire from US-Taliban battles.

Likewise our Chief of Medical Staff also reviews requests for humanitarian missions, particularly children, who are injured but not as a direct result of the fighting. Perhaps just a result of the tons of Soviet-planted mines from many decades ago. The local people, although fewer than fifty percent of our patients, tend to stay with us for a longer time due to a lack of qualified hospitals in Afghanistan.

Another peace-building mission the US and coalition forces are busy with is mentoring local health care systems to provide the needed care. I was able to look at pictures this past week of two very new hospitals in downtown Kabul. The hospitals are beautiful and have the technology. However, Afghan doctors may have from two weeks to six months of medical training. This creates a huge learning barrier compared with the US standard of Bachelors, medical school, residency trained, even fellowship and post-fellowship trained physicians. Even nurses in the US have a two-year Associates degree at a minimum, preferably four-year Bachelor’s degree, now the push is even to have Masters-trained nurses at the bedside. What a vast difference.

Our medical staff here at BAF (Bagram Air Field) will not get “out of the wire” (i.e. outside of the safety and security of our base). I’m okay with that. Others would like to get off base. I guess I would actually like to get off base to see the culture, see the lifestyle, see those who are so grateful for our presence. However, Afghanistan is not a safe country. Roadside bombs go off every single day. Some of them old Soviet mines, many of them newly planted Taliban bombs. Even the Afghans do not understand why the Taliban singles them out, why they want to hurt them. It is a senseless war, but I guess they all are to the innocent victims.

…tomorrow: Life at Bagram

First Lt. Karis Russell, a nurse at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, flushes the intravenous line of Rahmat Shah, a patient at Craig Joint Theater Hospital in 2007, shortly after the hospital opened.  Photo by Staff Sgt. Thomas J. Doscher, USAF

Tags: Bagram AFB, hospital, nurse, Stories

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Active Duty, Families, From the Front, National Guard, Parents, Reserves, Spouses, Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.